Nobl9 Unveils Open Source EKG Tool to Monitor Kubernetes

Nobl9 this week add an open source Essential Kubernetes Gauges (EKG) monitoring capability to that makes it simpler to track a range of metrics.

Nobl9 CTO Alex Nauda says EKG provides IT teams with an opinionated instance of a monitoring tool that is based on the platform the company created for managing service level objectives (SLOs) as code. That platform can be employed to monitor individual nodes and the Kubernetes application programming interface (API), for example, Nauda says.

That pre-fabricated approach to collecting metrics provides IT teams with a simple method for monitoring the reliability of Kubernetes clusters in a way that surfaces the probable root cause of an issue faster, he adds.

The goal now will be to extend EKG in a way that also enables IT teams to track and monitor usage patterns to make it easier to reduce the total cost of running cloud-native applications, notes Nauda.

At the same time, EKG should make managing Kubernetes environments less intimidating for the average IT administrator. One of the issues that often slows down Kubernetes adoption is there is far too much instrumentation baked into the core platform than many IT teams can initially make sense of when they are first exposed to Kubernetes clusters, says Nauda.

Nobl9 has been trying to spur greater adoption of SLOs by making available an open source SLO specification that defines a common interface for constructing SLOs across a Git-based workflow. Since OpenSLO was initially launched, more capabilities have been added, including a DataSource object that makes it easier to reuse connection details and which makes creating SLOs defined as code less verbose. Nobl9 has also released an OpenSLO-to-Nobl9 converter to transition OpenSLO YAML files into Nobl9 YAML when required.

SLOs, of course, are not a new idea. They have been used as a metric to track the performance of IT services for decades. However, as more microservices-based applications are built and deployed, it’s becoming more challenging to maintain SLOs across applications that have many more dependencies than legacy monolithic applications. Ultimately, each IT team needs to provide some sort of objective benchmark that assesses their overall effectiveness at delivering application services. SLO-as-code is intended to make it simpler to embed the ability to gather metrics within application environments and confirm whether service levels are being achieved.

It’s not clear whether reliance on SLOs has waned over the years or if application environments simply became too complex to track meaningful metrics. However, as applications are increasingly viewed as services, it’s now only a matter of time before SLOs become more widely employed across a modern application environment.

In the meantime, as more Kubernetes clusters are deployed in production environments, the need to make them more accessible to average IT administrators is becoming more acute. There are not enough DevOps professionals with the requisite programming skills required to manage fleets of Kubernetes clusters, so finding a way to augment them with IT administrators has become a crucial requirement. After all, an IT administrator may not be able to resolve every Kubernetes issue that arises, but they can certainly help identify them before a major disruption inevitably follows.